1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a digital rights management (DRM) system and, more particularly, to an apparatus and method for processing DRM contents having advertising contents attached thereto capable of allowing a user to receive DRM contents having advertising contents (referred to, hereinafter, as ‘AD contents’) attached thereto provided by a DRM system and to reproduce/use the DRM contents free of charge by reproducing the AD contents.
2. Description of the Related Art
With Internet businesses related to online communities, electronic transactions, or the like are continuing to be developed, most online contents providers are providing diverse contents to arouse the interest of users, by mainly providing multimedia services, such as music, images and video, as well as text. Various multimedia data is applied to various fields such as Internet broadcasting, education, news, sports, travel information, professional consulting, or the like, thus creating new types of services. Compared with analog contents, digital contents are advantageous in terms of its generation, processing, circulation and distribution, but in this case, the properties of digital contents of being easily copied cause a serious problem with respect to the protection of copyrights for works of digital creation.
A DRM system is a mechanism for stably protecting and systematically managing rights for digital assets, which provides a protection and management system with respect to a process by which contents are generated, published, distributed and used, as well as preventing unauthorized copying of contents.
The DRM system prevents illegal copying of contents such that digital contents are always provided in a coded state to allow an authenticated user to instantly decode to use it, and even if contents are somehow copied, if a user is not authenticated, he or she cannot use the contents.
The DRM system continuously protects digital contents and has various usage rules. In addition, DRM technique-applied contents are expected to follow the method of circulating, distributing and using existing digital information as it is, and a technical protection measure of the DRM must not cause user inconvenience.
Generally, users increasingly want to receive more various contents and also want to receive DRM contents at a low cost or without the burden of fees or charges. That is, a general DRM system needs to employ a method for providing DRM contents to users without incurring any fee charges.